A team of Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (Buet), who developed four advanced robots, will leave for Hanoi on August 24.

The Asia Pacific Broadcasting Union (ABU) has been organising the annual event since 2002.

A total of 18 countries, including Japan, China, India, South Korea, Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand and Egypt, are taking part in the competition this year.

The Bangladeshi team will have to defeat any two countries in the first round to qualify for the second round of the high-tech international robot games.

The thee-member Buet team is composed of team leader Muhammad Yakut Ali, SGM Hossain Mamur and Hasnat Jamil. They are taking part in the competition under the supervision of Prof Md Zahurul Haq of mechanical engineering department of Buet.

Prof Haq said, "It is a contest to design and build robots that can perform certain tasks based on theme and rules of the competition."

He said the Buet team has developed four advanced robots -- three of them are intelligent mobile robots and the rest one is manually controlled -- at the mechanical engineering department's laboratory.

For building the robots, several equipment were procured from shops at Dholaikhal and Nawabpur in old part of the city while advanced controllers, chips and hardware were imported from the USA, he added.

Bangladesh first participated in Robocon 2005, Beijing and won Panasonic Award. The competition was held in Kuala Lumpur last year.